


The Carrie Diaries

by marrlin46



Category: Homeland
Genre: Fluff, Origins, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 06:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13541589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marrlin46/pseuds/marrlin46
Summary: Random snapshots from Carrie's early CIA career and beyond that I've always been curious about...Cannonish





	The Carrie Diaries

**Author's Note:**

> Be warned: this is my fic ever with no beta reading. I welcome any and all feedback. Also let me know if there are any scenes (in HL cannon) you'd like to see...

You've been chainsmoking and nursing a now tepid whiskey, long since watered down by ice cubes, for the past two hours. The sun is just beginning to rise. You've been back two days from another stint in Baghdad, and still very jet lagged, hence why you've been up at 4am with a pack of Marlboros and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. 

You're bored and restless, and a little drunk, and can't seem to recalibrate, readjust your senses to the quiet and neatness, the wide openness of suburban DC, especially compared to the dusty, cacophonous, claustrophobic streets of Baghdad. You, of course, desperately need the break after 18 months without one, but you desperately wish you were there in the center of it all. You can't take the stillness and pedestrianness of it all. 

A few hours later, you're pacing around your shitty rental house waiting for Maggie to meet you for lunch. As always when you're fidgety and nervous, you apply and re-apply your makeup, reevaluate your outfit choice for the tenth time today, try to calm down with jazz, all to no avail. You're nervous as fuck. You haven't seen Maggie in a year and a half, and yet you feel apathetic about seeing her. 

You love and miss her, of course. But you've seen too much shit over the past few months-car bomb and IED explosions, Iraqi colleagues and informants tortured and killed for collaborating with the infidels, the smell of burning flesh a near constant presence. You want to tell Maggie all of it, every grisly and ugly detail, but you know she could never understand. Maggie will try to glean something out of you and ask the perfunctory questions of your work over there ('How is it? What are you doing over there? Are you staying safe? etc.) You'll use the excuse of 'it's classified,' and instead, you'll both stick to banal small talk: Dad, the girls, Maggie's work. 

It's a tired routine they've played out over and over again, ever since her first foreign posting in Lebanon a few years ago. 

And, like always, Maggie will ask about the state of your mental health, and you'll deflect, like always. Inevitably, you'll have to suck it up, answer her questions with attempted earnestness and make more empty promises to really take the treatment of her illness more seriously, all so you can pry another few weeks' supply of lithium from Maggie. 

It's not a concern for you abroad. In Baghdad, you simply walked down to your neighborhood pharmacy and surreptitiously slipped the head pharmacist a $100 bill for a 4-month supply of lithium in a pill bottle labeled for anti-nausea medicine. But now that you're here in the States for a few weeks on mandatory R&R, you need your sister's samples. Lately though, you've only been taking a pill every few days to keep up with the demands of your job. Before leaving, you were assigned to identify and bring down the insurgent group that killed eleven American soldiers in the span of a week. 

You're right at the edge of a full-blown manic episode, you can feel it-the teetering, the ever-so-slight fraying of reality, the vivid dreams. You're starting to lose control. The hypomanic state you've been has served you well these past months, but now with nothing to focus all of that energy on, all you want to do is find someone, anyone, to fuck. Right now. Anything to make the humming in your brain stop, even for a few minutes. Before you can act on that impulse, you hear the sound of Maggie's minivan approaching.

In the car, Maggie scrutinizes you before you even have the chance to say, ''Hello."

"You look like shit," Maggie says as she takes note of your sallow face, dark circles, and much smaller frame. Honestly your physical deterioration has hardly registered with you until now

"Hello to you too, Maggie," you respond bitingly. "Let's just get it over with."

"Get what over with?"

"The nagging. 'Are you taking your meds? Are you eating and sleeping enough? You really need to do better…' You know, the usual concerns or whatever. For the record, it's none of your or Dad's goddamn business, so just leave me the fuck alone for five fucking minutes!" the words practically spilling out of your mouth before you can stop them.

"Are you though? You seem a little man-

"Don't fucking say it," you snarl.

"…keyed up," Maggie responds softly, sensing the tenseness and hurt radiating off of you.

You take a big sigh and run your hands through your hair.

"I work in a warzone, Maggie, and no, I don't want to-I can't-talk about it," you say a little more gently. You don't mean to be such a bitch to your sister, but you're doing your best you can right now.

You and Maggie spend the rest of the car ride in silence; NPR spouting off the latest casualty count in Iraq from the fifth car bomb that week.


End file.
